SOCRATES special issue VOL. 6 NO.1 2018-Preview

English is a language that cuts across territorial boundaries. As a world of seven vast
continents shrinks into a global village, the concept of the chained, pained, colonized
individual fades into oblivion. So, on the other hand, the current generation of the
postcolonised has snatched the oppressor’s sword away, wielding it now as a counter weapon,
as it were. It articulates in the language of the ‘master’ with a charming finesse, creates
literature through it, with an unmatched power and passion. It struts about in ‘European’
attire and has adopted the privileges of that lifestyle with considerable ease. The subaltern, the
victim has risen from the ashes as a glorious Phoenix. It spreads its wings, it soars. And, it sings.
The paper Causeway to the Cosways studies Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which
has also been picturesquely converted into a movie and often been studied in comparison with
Bronte’s Jane Eyre’s. The paper explores how the novel moves on from a “reverse
Bildungsroman” towards a Kunstlerroman.
Salman Rushdie’s seventh novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which the mythic mode
has been applied, and which I have myself examined as a postmodern text (in my doctoral
thesis), has been studied in one of the selected papers with particular reference to the
transnational migration of its protagonists, “which is essentially a postcolonial factor”. The
author discusses how migration of individuals to different countries across the globe blurs the
East- West frontiers and results in producing a new set of socio-cultural beliefs and different
social expectations.
One of the contributors to this edition has taken up the study of two novels of Chinua
Achebe, a very pertinent writer in terms of postcolonial exploration. He has shown in Achebe’s
novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, the plight of the Nigerian people as they
face the painful onslaught of an alien culture. Significantly, both the negative as well as the
positive side of the pre and post colonized worlds are depicted. “Achebe’s protagonists were
able to retain a sense of their pre colonial glory” as opposed to what Joseph Conrad documents
about Africa in his monumental text Heart of Darkness.
Another paper presents how the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith deals with the
“contemporary ethical issues surrounding genetic testing” bringing unethical scientific
practices on colonized races into focus. The writer has made an attempt in this paper to put his
views alongside the lectures of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. It sends a powerful message to
the readers about the impact of such policies over the future of science, education and
research.
This special edition had also hoped to include some creative writing which has the fervor of
the postcolonial spirit at its core. Unfortunately, we received only one poem. The poet shows
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